Talk:General Discussion/@comment-32184516-20180312170008
So, guys, what do you think about the last relic we got off of Duriken, the blackened plate? Obviously, we didn't get much of a chance to test it out (I suppose you could, if you killed Duriken first and then went for Aizu...and were stupid enough to equip someone with it for the remainder of that fight), but as far as it's potential usability for Chapter 4...this thing seems even more worthless than the Shaman's Blindfold. Yeah, it's pretty high quality armor if you ignore the curse on it, but once you start factoring that in, you have to find a way that 21 points of defense can consistenly offset 30 points of damage every turn, and to be frank, if you have anyone getting hit that hard that often, you're already playing the game wrong. True, I suppose you can put on the Regenerative cloak and drop it to 20 points of damage, but that's still like being poisoned constantly. I can only see this sort of armor being used situationally, and even them, I'm struggling to imagine a situation where using it would actaully be viable. I can almost guarantee you that we're not going to find an accessory like Duriken's cape which restores 30 HP per turn; that would just be too overpowered. And this isn't even getting into the fact that there's more protective armor available from the shops. Premium Plate Armor and the Turgid Vest are right on par with protectability as the Blackened Plate and the Imperial Plate Armor outstrips it altogether with defense +24. And odds are, we're going to find even better stuff in the next chapter. Now. I realize that some of us out here have a massive aversion to spending our precious zloteks at all, myself included, but seriously, we're 3/4 of the way through the series already, and if you've really been hoarding through all the chapters you should have an excess of 10,000 zloteks, and if you're not going to spend at least some of them by this point, what's the point of even having them? You can buy the best equipment money can get for your team at the end of Chapter 3, and if you've been wise with your cash, you'll still have a couple thousand zloteks of spending change. All this to say, if you really want top-tier armor, you can get some that's better than the Blackened Plate. Now I can hear you all saying, "But what about the lack of evasion penalty? Wouldn't that offset the HP damage?" Well, in my opinion, no, for several reasons. First off, usually having high evasion and high defense are somewhat counterintuitive goals; if you're going for high evasion you're banking on the hope that your opponent's NOT going to hit you, and if you're stocking up on high defense your anticpiating that the hits are going to land and you want to soak up as much damage as you can with your armor. I mean, sure, if you can have your cake and eat it too, who wouldn't want to build a character with crazy stats all around, high defense, high evade, etc., but practically that's just not how a party based RPG should work; you need to specialize your characters for designated tasks to get the most out of them. Evasion as a stat corresponds to a nimble assassin style character build, great fro someone like Ysabel, Reynold, Vadim, and Aizu, while high defense goes with bulky tank characters like Tevoran, and there's not a lot of overlap between the two. Yes, I would concede that Reynold can and should be used as a tank, but here's the thing: he can't use heavy armor. And that's what the real problem with the Blackened Plate is; we only have three characters that can even equip it, none of whom have naturally high evade rates. Ivan is the only character of these three that can really pull off a fast, nimble build, but If you really want to build him for speed you're probably going to be equiping him with the Greasy Leather Jacket anyway, so that's out, and trying ramp up evade on Tevoran and Martin is like putting ballet slippers on a linebacker. And we already have multiple sets of heavy armor they can use just from drops. We already have more heavy armor than we have characters who can, much less should, wear it, so unless we get some new party members in the next chapter that can, I can't see any reason to equip this set on anyone. The only guy I can imagine making use out of it is Tevoran, and he's usually so far from the front lines that there's no point. What do you all think? Is the Blackened Plate a cool but useless trophy, or, as per usual, am I overlooking something critical to the discussion?